The best home colour schemes are those that aren’t immediately obvious.
Think about the number of times you’ve walked into someone’s house and thought “wow – this is lovely”. At first, you won’t be able to put your finger on the main reason why; the furniture is very nice, the layout well considered and everything just feels right.
Chances are, the colour scheme is one of the main reasons you’ll have taken an instant liking to the house in question. Get this vital element right, and your own home will have the exact same effect on its visitors.
Unfortunately, picking the right colour scheme for a house is tricky. There are now literally thousands of colour ‘families’ to choose from, and opting for the one that best accentuates your rooms is a challenge if you’re not an interior designer by trade.
However, there are some clever strategies you can lean on to ease the process, and we’d like to summarise them for you:
1. Note the visibility of one room from another
Your house may be made up of individual rooms, but each one will offer a window into the next, therefore its important to walk through your house and make notes of which rooms you can see from the space you’re standing in.
Beyond the obvious adjoining rooms, you might be able to see quite a bit further; for example, the kitchen and diner might be visible from the living room.
From these notes, you can begin to form your entire house’s colour palette, so keep them close by.
2. Go for the biggest room first
The biggest, most centrally-located room is the room to start on.
It will most likely be your kitchen or living room, but whichever space you deem the ‘king’ of the house, choose a soft, neutral hue from which you can build out the rest of the colour palette.
Don’t be afraid to opt for white, either – you simply can’t go wrong with it!
3. …Or try the one where you want the boldest colour
If you have a bold colour scheme in mind, rather than going for the biggest room, go for the space where you want it to feature most prominently.
This could be anywhere – you bathroom, for example. From that bold colour choice, you can gradually filter it down throughout the rest of the house with different hues (see next tip).
4. Create a palette from the sam hue
By now, you should have a main colour from which to work, so you can start the fun process of building a palette from shades of its hue.
As previously noted, there are a colossal number of paint colours now available, so you’ll be spoilt for choice. The trick is to stay within that hue and opt for slightly darker or lighter versions as you make your way around each room. In doing so, you’ll create a colour scheme that is perfectly matched.
5. Try working on upstairs and downstairs rooms separately
There’s nothing wrong with working from two separate colour schemes; one for upstairs, another for downstairs.
If your house has true separation between floors and you want to create a different ambiance within each, this is a great tactic.
6. Plan for seasonal changes
Remember – colour schemes are seasonal, and as the seasons change, you might find that certain hues clash with what’s going on outside the house.
Interior design trends change all the time and what’s popular this season may feel outdated very soon. For example, using dark colours in small spaces used to be rather unpopular (as it make space look smaller) however recent trends in bathroom décor see growing popularity of dark and moody colours.
For this reason, unless you have that bold base colour in mind, it really does pay to go neutral, or, if you’re really up for it, plan to change the paint scheme every couple of years in order to experiment with the way each one interacts with the passing seasons.
That’s it!
See? Choosing the right colour scheme for your house isn’t as difficult as we first made out, is it?
Use our tips above, and you’ll soon build a palette for your own home that will make it a simply wonderful place to live and visit. Need more inspiration? Below are some interesting articles on the subject.
Living room colour schemes brimming with character. – idealhome.co.uk
Colour of the year 2017 – Dulux.co.uk